


Of Sexiness

by yourlibrarian



Series: Fanfic Genres [10]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Major Character(s), Meta, Threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 16:27:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6863020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A post at the <a href="http://symposium.transformativeworks.org/2011/10/ot3s-disrupting-the-intimate-society/">TWC symposium blog</a> caught my attention as it focused on a strand of fanfic I don't see enough of.  I'm not sure I'm convinced that threesome fic, particularly the M/F/M variety, is growing in quantity.  Of course, that may be because I've been reading in SPN fandom for the past few years and simple het is scarce on the ground.  But as our Classic Recs session just ended again at <a href="http://buffyversetop5.livejournal.org/">buffyversetop5</a>, it was easy enough to look at the numbers in a verse that was built on het.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Sexiness

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted November 3, 2011

This post at the [TWC symposium blog](http://symposium.transformativeworks.org/2011/10/ot3s-disrupting-the-intimate-society/) caught my attention as it focused on a strand of fanfic I don't see enough of. I'm not sure I'm convinced that threesome fic, particularly the M/F/M variety, is growing in quantity. Of course, that may be because I've been reading in SPN fandom for the past few years and simple het is scarce on the ground. But as our Classic Recs session just ended again at [buffyversetop5](http://buffyversetop5.dreamwidth.org/), it was easy enough to look at the numbers in a verse that was built on het.

Although the rec archive includes Firefly, Dollhouse, Angel, and Dr. Horrible recs, there are many more BtVS recs than for any other canon. Also, as we've been collecting recs since 2005 there's a fair stretch of time in which fanworks have been created and recced. 

Obviously a recs community is self-selecting in terms of what appears. There are definitely some anomalies -- for example there is far less buffy/angel in the archive than has been written. While Top 5 includes recs from all sorts of external archives and sites, there's certainly a predominance of LJ hosted content. And I have come to believe that there was never that much buffy/angel hosted at LJ compared to sites elsewhere, which may explain why there is such a drastic undercount in this area compared to other major ships such as buffy/spike, angel/spike, and xander/spike. On the other hand, I think the archive does reflect the waxing and waning of certain ships since new recs come in every year. For example, xander/spike is still being written steadily, with both a year-round community and a seasonal community, whereas angel/spike seems to have declined in popularity and has fallen behind in the rec count.

However there are well over 200 pairings tagged, including some very rare ones, so my feeling is that while not all the proportions match the quantity of fic produced, that not much is being entirely _missed_. 

So it's interesting to see what occurs with threesomes:

· pairing: threesome fff - 2 uses  
· pairing: threesome ffm - 8 uses  
· pairing: threesome fmm - 28 uses  
· pairing: threesome mmm - 16 uses  
· pairing: buffy/angel/spike - 31 uses

There are definitely more "het oriented" threesomes being recced than slash or femslash ones. In fact there are so many recced for buffy/angel/spike that it remains the sole threesome listed by name. (Clearly it wouldn't take long to browse the other categories). This is not surprising since that pairing involves three of the most popular characters in the verse, two of them the series' leads. 

The first thing is that, while the amount of het and slash recced in the archive is roughly even, only two ships account for almost all the het or slash content, with the rest made up by ships with fewer than 20 recs each, many only 1. It's more unbalanced on the het side but, despite the number of female characters in the Buffyverse, there still isn't much femslash content by comparison, even though there are two canon lesbian ships (more if you count the comics).

My feeling is that what counts the most in what gets written is how many potential readers there are for the material, and thus the recs may be more significant in some ways than the numbers on fic being produced. That's why I'd bet there are very few cases where a show or group's leads don't dominate the major ships in a fandom, particularly a TV fandom. While those leads aren't necessarily the most popular characters, they are major attention getters in terms of people being drawn into the fandom and in getting the focus of canon storylines, from which a lot of fanfic springs. If the leads are also considered attractive (which is generally the case in casting decisions anyway) you can pretty much count on it.

What gets weighed against the visibility of the characters and their draw in ships are potential squicks in their pairings. Certainly the litmus test has to be fandoms such as Harry Potter, where a lot of the characters were underage for most of the canon, or SPN where the leads were siblings. Yet both of these are large fandoms where neither of these factors inhibited the "lead characters" factor from predominating in fic. Squicks will be overcome in a major way if it means that popular characters get written together.

One statistic that could make one laugh is to consider the tiny amount of RPS recced for the Whedonverses (9 items in nearly 6 years) compared to the quantity still coming out by the bucketload in SPN fandom, despite canon marriages among the leads. While RP fic was clearly an inhibiting factor for many readers in these earlier fandoms, for many in SPN fandom it seemed preferable to slashing brothers. One way or another, those leads were to be gotten together. Small surprise though that there was a fandom pile-on when Castiel finally appeared to provide a different option. However, I find it interesting to consider how Dean/Castiel did not take over fandom at once the way one might expect, either due to novelty or a way out of other conundrums. My personal opinion is that, sexual or not, the Winchesters so clearly prioritize one another in canon that it is very difficult to write a different pairing for either one, and this is the same reason that threesomes don't get seen very often. 

My sense is that while the subtext often suggests a threesome reading in canons, and that these threesomes generally involve several if not all of a show's leads, that this fic gets written quite _rarely_ by comparison to slash or het pairings (which are often just as subtextual). I think that the resistance to such pairings is stronger than squicks against incest, or underage, or most other things one could choose. In fact, I believe that some threesomes get written _because_ of a squick. 

I think an enormous number of readers and writers have a strong aversion to infidelity and an incredible attachment to very strict monogamy. The number of stories I've seen where the characters don't seem to be permitted to even _think_ of other possible sexual relationships are legion. There seems to be a concurrent obsession with "claiming" tropes that run the gamut from complicated supernatural rituals to ordinary tattoos, as well as the erasure or dismissal of previous romantic or sexual relationships. All of which is to say that if the canon contains a marriage, particularly one that can not be easily dismissed (such as that in White Collar), then there is a greater likelihood of a M/F/M threesome being written in that fandom. Not more than the slash, but more than if there were "non-attached" female characters in that canon. So I see the predominance of a seriously attached male lead in an otherwise slashy canon to be the most indicative of a strand of threesome fic in that fandom, because writers will be more willing to acknowledge the marriage by writing a threesome than to have the lead being unfaithful.

In the end threesome fic is more _locally_ subversive than it is a societal "rebellion", the way it bucks many unwritten rules of ship writing. As the 2011 recs at Top 5 won't begin until January it remains to be seen whether the threesome number goes up this year. But my guess is that we aren't going to see any more there than in any previous year.


End file.
